problems with Open Office comments/notes

[julesjones]

There's a conversation in a locked post about using Open Office instead of MS Word. I'm putting some of the information in an unlocked post, as it may be useful to other people.

I use Lotus Word Pro as my word processor, because I do not get on with Word, for values of "do not get on" that involve literally screaming at the computer within ten minutes or so. However, there are editors and publishers out there who insist on using Word documents for dealing with edits (and that's Word format documents, not rtf format). Word Pro can import and export Word files, but I've got an old version that doesn't know about the most recent Word formats.

I installed Open Office because it's supposed to be fully compatible with Microsoft's office suite, and in theory should be a way to read Word files. In fact, Open Office's word processor falls down on a very important function -- comments/notes, those useful little Post-It analogues which allow people to put comments into the document without inserting them into the actual text. it has a comments/notes facility of its own, but it does not display comments/notes from imported Word files. There is no warning of this anywhere, so the first I knew about it was when I sent off my response to "track changes" edits, and got a plaintive "what about the comments?" email back from my editor.

At least one of my friends has had a similar problem, so after the discussion in my LJ this morning, I wandered over to the OO website and had a poke in the bug tracker. It turns out that this is a known issue, and while this one is relatively recent, various other problems with the comments/notes have gone unfixed for five years, often with rather snotty "nobody actually uses notes so this isn't a priority" replies from the development team. It is simply not seen as an important facility by the development team.

Apparently the problem with the display is that the comments are imported as hidden text. You can "easily" work around the non-display of imported comments by using the Navigator or by turning on display of non-printing characters (in the View menu in the version I'm using), so it's not seen as an issue that needs to be fixed any time soon. More details here:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=53885
I've just tried the Navigator and "non-printing characters" workarounds and they do seem to work in 2.0.4, but it's a major pain. I gather from the annoyed commentary in the bug tracker that earlier versions of OO did display imported comments, even if not particularly well. I've just downloaded the latest version, 2.1, so once that's installed I'll see if that has an updated help file.

I have to say that dismissing this as a trivial issue, and not even bothering to put the problem and workaround in the help file, does not lead me to think any better of Open Office than of the Spawn of Redmond. I'd downloaded OO primarily as a backup word processor, but I was also evaluating it for a primary WP should I finally bite the bullet and move away from Windows as an OS. This issue means that I *cannot* use it as a primary. My WP need to be fully compatible with Word, and the comment facility is the main reason it needs to be fully compatible. Right now a 1999 edition of Word Pro has better compatibility than a late 2006 edition of OO Writer.

Comments

[pteppic.livejournal.com]

I see it as one of the main barriers of OO.org to industry IT. OO.orgs primary concern is on document formatting and editing, some emphasis on usability. For the geek sat at home, this is pretty much it. Hell, for 80% of industry, this is pretty much it as well. However some industries that are document heavy, such as legal or journalism are centered around collaborate editing and revision. M$ Office does a good job at this. If OO.org wants to be really serious about taking on M$ Office, this is a large area they need to tackle properly.

[julesjones]

Yes, they don't seem to get that even if only 20% of users are heavily into collaborative work, they can't just dismiss it as not important. Not only will I not move to OO because of this, I will actively discourage other people from doing so -- and I *hate* Word. Like it or not, the Spawn of Redmond has most of the market, and you *have* to be properly compatible on functions used by significant numbers of people, or it's simply not feasible for people to move over by themselves. That notes within Writer more or less work is completely irrelevant if you still have to collaborate with Word users.

It's the fact that they didn't even see the problem as worthy of mention in the help file that really bothers me. If there's a workaround, even a horrible kludge, that's one thing -- but for practical purposes that workaround does not exist, because it's not anywhere where the average user can find it. And failing to warn that there's an issue - not on. Not on at all.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

I have a few bug reports outstanding on OO. However, none of them are the same as yours! (Most of them were related to problems with printing and page layout.) As with most open source projects, the enthusiasms of the coders are paramount. Like you, I was evaluating OO as a possible primary WP, but I couldn't quite get it working well enough.

Some of your problems, though, are of Redmond's devise - differences between versions of Word, which forces you to use the latest version, which in turn seems to get worse with every release.

NB: "Track changes" can be useful, but I know organisations that would pay to have the feature removed.

[julesjones]

Oh, don't get me started on why I hate the Spawn of Redmond and its ever more bizarre incompatibilities with itself, never mind anything else. I used to quite like Word when I had to use it on someone else's machine, back somewhere around Version 2. But I've never voluntarily installed it on any machine under my control, and we had Lotus SmartSuite at work (which is why I've always used Lotus Word Pro on my home computers).

However, this specific problem is not of Redmond's making. This is a relatively simple widget that my Word Pro Millenium (1999 vintage) can display perfectly well in imported-from-MS files, both .doc and MS's borked .rtf. For once I'm fairly sure that this failure is on the part of the other software, i.e. OO.

I want to like OO, I really do, but the "we know better than you do what you need and what you don't need" arrogance I've seen displayed in the bug-tracker is every bit as bad as Redmond's.

Besides, in other respects it's entirely too good at emulating Word. I did briefly use it for a short story manuscript because it would be good to have something I don't need to double check for weirdness after converting from Word Pro's native format, but I found that OO Writer drives me up the wall in the same way that Word does. If MS finally manage to piss me off to the point where I abandon Windows as an OS, I may have to learn to live with OO as my primary office suite, but right now I'm not eager to try.